It’s that time of the year again and I’m happy to see Advent calendars for many tech communities are still going strong. As in past years (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and for some reason skipped 2015), I’ve gathered a few here that I’ll be following this year:

Here’s what I’m currently listening to when I can. They’ve been piling up a little bit now that my commute is so short, but last week I had a round-trip drive from San Jose to Fresno so really got caught up :) See last year’s updates atBest Technical Podcasts.

Hosted by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, this is probably the podcast I’ve listened to the longest. As their site says, the shows “range from introductory information to hardcore geekiness.” In particular I really like their “geek out” episodes, most recently: Supersonic Aircraft Geek Out

]]>Tweetfave Growth Tops 240K Tweetshttp://www.cantoni.org/2016/04/20/tweetfave-growth-240k
Wed, 20 Apr 2016 22:15:35 +0000http://www.cantoni.org/?p=776Continue reading Tweetfave Growth Tops 240K Tweets→]]>Ever since I launched Tweetfave in 2013, it’s been quietly working away and slowly growing. (For some more of the background, see Brief History of Tweetfave.)

An update on the numbers so far:

Over 200 users have tried the service, with over 100 still active

Over 240,000 favorite tweets have been marked and emailed

Here’s a growth chart which shows the tweet count growing at a steady rate ever since we went live. The rate of new users cooled off after that first year but is still growing by a few each month. The growth has basically been some word-of-mouth and people who stumble across it (I’m not doing anything active to reach out). I guess you could call it a “hockey stick” growth curve if you count those first 2 years with me as the only user :)

Tweetfave 5-Year Growth Chart
]]>Twitter Favorites RSS Feedshttp://www.cantoni.org/2015/09/04/twitter-favorites-rss-feeds
Sat, 05 Sep 2015 00:30:06 +0000http://www.cantoni.org/?p=768Continue reading Twitter Favorites RSS Feeds→]]>Twitter dropped RSS feeds in early 2013 (Mashable) and never had direct support for RSS feeds from favorites. I still use Twitter favorites as a bookmark or “read it later” service for myself and have been running the Tweetfave service for over 2 years now. Tying these ideas together, I’ve just rolled out Twitter favorites RSS feed support in Tweetfave.

How it Works

Tweetfave periodically scans your account (using the official API) and summarizes all favorited tweets in an email. Now the system will also update a feed which can be used with other systems that accept standard RSS feeds.

The RSS feed will be created with each tweet contained in an item element with the following fields set:

title – text version of the tweet

description – text version of the tweet, plus a link to the original tweet

content:encoded – HTML version of the tweet, plus a link to the original tweet

What to Do

So what can be done now that you have an RSS feed of your Twitter favorites? I like to use IFTTT which is an awesome application for connecting different services together. (For a great overview, see their About IFTTT page).

I’ve set up my recipes where the source trigger is a new item in the RSS feed and the target is a service like Instapaper, Paper, or Evernote. You can configure the fields and formatting sent to various services, giving you lots of different options.

IFTTT Recipe Examples

Notes

Here are a few notes and caveats to keep in mind:

If you’re a new Tweetfave user, you need to favorite at least one tweet first, and wait for the first email before your feed link is created

Your RSS feed link is somewhat obfuscated so that people can’t guess it. It’s also only shown to you after login, so you can still keep your favorites stream private.

If a favorited tweet has multiple links, you will have multiple RSS items (because each one can only have one link). This seems like a good compromise even at the expense of some extra entries.

The time between favoriting a tweet and it appearing in your feed is not instant; Tweetfave currently scans everything at 2-hour intervals, then sends emails and updates the feeds.

If you disable your Tweetfave account, the RSS feed file will still be online but won’t be updated. If you’d like the file removed, just email me.

Feedback

I’d love to hear feedback from anyone trying this out, including any interesting use cases people come up with!

]]>Nest for Sprinklers: OpenSprinklerhttp://www.cantoni.org/2015/06/16/opensprinkler
Wed, 17 Jun 2015 01:50:42 +0000http://www.cantoni.org/?p=761Continue reading Nest for Sprinklers: OpenSprinkler→]]>My friend Jeff Cable was one of the early adopters of the Nest thermostat. At the time we talked a lot about the obvious next step of supporting home sprinkler/irrigation controls. Especially here in California (where we are in a pretty serious drought), having better control over irrigation (not to mention the remote access) seems like the logical next step.

Rather than waiting around for Nest, I just bought and installed an OpenSprinkler. OpenSprinkler started out as a hobby kit for makers and they still sell it a variety of ways, from kits to completed units. The software is open source as well.

There is also the possibility that if OpenSprinkler can get certified by the EPA WaterSense program, that rebates from water agencies could be possible (similar to low-flow toilets, energy-saving water heaters, etc.). Getting certified is still on the to-do list according to this OpenSprinkler update from Feb 2015.

Hardware

Replacing my old Lawn Genie controller with the OpenSprinkler controller was really simple. All the cabling is compatible (assuming you have the standard 24 VAC controllers), so it’s just a matter of reconnecting everything to the OpenSprinkler. You’ll also need to connect to your home network with an Ethernet cable. (The OpenSprinkler itself does not have Wi-Fi.)

Here’s a comparison of the old Lawn Genie and the new OpenSprinkler:

My original 20+ year old Lawn Genie controllerMy new OpenSprinkler installed

Software

The more interesting part is the software which is easy to set up from a web browser. You can give your zones nice names like “front lawn” or “back roses” so you don’t have to remember zone numbers. Programming the schedule is pretty straightforward as well. If you attach a rain sensor, the OpenSprinkler can also operate in a smart weather mode where it decreases the amount of watering based on local rain or weather forecasts from Weather Underground.

Once you have the software configured, I recommend downloading one of the OpenSprinkler mobile apps so you can control everything from around the house (via Wi-Fi). For me this was one of the best use cases: while I’m out adjusting sprinklers I can remotely turn each zone on or off. (I know, the exciting life of a homeowner!)

With all of the above you’ll have mobile access, but only on your home wireless network. You can also configure your home network to allow access externally from anywhere (depending on your comfort level for setting this up and exposing to the internet in general). Now you can have remote access just like you can for your Nest thermostat :)

People created some pretty crazy mashups with Pipes. For me the simple ability to combine RSS feeds with some simple logic was very useful (for example: 2014 Tech Advent Calendars). I also recently created some Stack Overflow feed tools for work which will have to be recreated in Python or something similar.

I worked at Yahoo for almost 7 years and the phrase “Product Prioritization” became kind of a good-news/bad-news thing towards the end. It always sounds good (it’s logical to focus resources on the most important products and sites), but if the closure affected the site that you work, that’s not as much fun. (In the end that was the final result for me and much of my team on the Yahoo Developer Network.)

Every so often I like to publish my current podcast subscriptions (last update from late 2013: Top 7 Technical Podcasts). Since joining DataStax a year ago my commute time is significantly shorter, so I’ve slimmed down my playlist as well.

I’ve been listening to these guys for over 10 years now, and they’ve recently hit episode 1132. That’s a lot of podcasts! In March 2014 they merged in The Tablet Show (which had 130 episodes on its own). These days it’s not only about .Net, but covers a lot of different technologies and platforms. The Geek Out espisodes are especially good, if you’re in to that sort of thing.

I really enjoyed the interview style and variety of guests on this show by Justin Jackson. It’s no longer regularly produced (last episode was December 2014), but I’m still subscribed to scoop up any new ones.

It’s not published very often, but still worth hearing the latest ideas from Patrick McKenzie and his experiences running SaaS businesses.

Colophon:

I’m still using and can highly recommend the Downcast iPhone app. It has a handy export feature for your podcast subscription list in OPML format. I have a simple Python script (podcast.py) which converts it to Markdown text, then I just added my review comments to create this point.

]]>Traffic Resuming After WordPress Hackhttp://www.cantoni.org/2015/04/28/traffic-resuming-after-wordpress-hack
Wed, 29 Apr 2015 01:06:46 +0000http://www.cantoni.org/?p=740Continue reading Traffic Resuming After WordPress Hack→]]>Early in March this site was hit with a WordPress hack that was present for about 10 days until I discovered and fixed it. After the fix I was frequently checking Google Webmaster Tools to make sure search results returned. After about one week, my traffic (from Google at least) had pretty much recovered to the pre-hack levels:
Google search traffic recovering after WordPress hack removed

And here is the corresponding timeline from Google Analytics, showing traffic slowly returning to normal:

Google Analytics numbers recovering after WordPress hack removed
]]>Recovering from a WordPress Hackhttp://www.cantoni.org/2015/03/11/recovering-from-a-wordpress-hack
Wed, 11 Mar 2015 21:47:40 +0000http://www.cantoni.org/?p=729Continue reading Recovering from a WordPress Hack→]]>Last night I had the unpleasant discovery that this site’s WordPress had been “hacked”, with every post redirecting to an uploaded “this site has been hacked” variety of HTML file. I looked back and realized it happened on March 1st and mad at myself for not noticing sooner.

Fortunately it was pretty easy to clean up by zapping the database and restoring from a good backup (thankfully I have daily backups running).

The harder part is going to be recovering in Google’s view. Search queries as shown in Google Webmaster Tools dropped like crazy right away:

Search queries chart from Google Webmaster Tools

And here’s the corresponding crawl errors view:

Crawl Errors Chart from Google Webmaster Tools

Hopefully after a little time the Google crawler will see all those pages returned, but I’m guessing whatever page rank I had will be very slow to recover (if it ever does). In the meantime I’ve improved my WordPress security a bit more, updated to the latest of everything, and removed a few unused plugins. Next will be to set something up to notify me more quickly if this happens again.

]]>DataStax Installer with Vagranthttp://www.cantoni.org/2015/01/05/datastax-installer-vagrant
Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:06:56 +0000http://www.cantoni.org/?p=714Continue reading DataStax Installer with Vagrant→]]>I’ve continued to make improvements to my “Cassandra on Vagrant” project (Using Vagrant for Local Cassandra Development) which shows how to install open-source Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise in a variety of different ways. Using Vagrant is very helpful for local development and testing. Virtual images can be created very quickly and can be erased when done, keeping your primary development system clean.

Recently I added an example which uses the DataStax Enterprise (DSE) standalone installer which first appeared in DSE 4.5. The standalone installer normally runs in a graphical UI mode, but can also be run in an unattended mode which I’m using here.

To play with the examples, grab a copy of the Vagrant projects from GitHub: bcantoni/vagrant-cassandra. Once you have Vagrant and VirtualBox set up, check out example 5. DSE Installer and go through the setup.

On my Mac laptop, creating a 3-node DSE cluster takes less than 5 minutes. (The speed is greatly improved because we only need to download the installer once.) The installer has several options for running in unattended mode, so the installation can be customized as needed.